“It's All About Time”: Time as Contested Terrain in the Management and Experience of Domiciliary Care Work in England

• Author: Sebastian M. Ugarte,Gail Hebson,Jill Rubery,Damian Grimshaw
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/hrm.21685
• Date: 01 September 2015
• Published date: 01 September 2015

Human Resource Management, September–October 2015, Vol. 54, No. 4. Pp. 753–772

© 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com).

DOI:10.1002/hrm.21685

Correspondence to: Jill Rubery, University of Manchester, Manchester Business School, Booth Street West,

Manchester M15 6PB UK, Phone: +44 1613063406, Fax: +44 161 3063552, E-mail: jill.rubery@mbs.ac.uk

“IT’S ALL ABOUT TIME”:

TIMEASCONTESTED TERRAIN

IN THE MANAGEMENT AND

EXPERIENCE OF DOMICILIARY

CARE WORK IN ENGLAND

JILL RUBERY, DAMIAN GRIMSHAW, GAIL HEBSON,

AND SEBASTIAN M. UGARTE

Drawing on a multilevel study of commissioning, employers, and care staff, this

article explores the role of time in the management of domiciliary care work for

older adults in England and the consequences for the employment conditions of

care staff. An index of fragmented time practices among 52 independent-sector

domiciliary care providers reveals widespread tendencies to use zero-hours con-

tracts and limit paid hours to face-to-face contact time, leaving travel time and

other work-related activities unpaid. Care staff interviews reveal how fragmented

time creates insecurities and demands high work engagement. Time manage-

ment practices are shown to derive directly from strict time-based local author-

ity commissioning. Subcontractors, both independent small fi rms and those

belonging to national chains, can at best adopt human resource (HR) policies that

are partial routes to failure, as evident in widespread recruitment and retention

problems. Informal HR practices to accommodate working-time preferences help

to retain individual staff, but adjustments are often marginal, adversely affect

other staff and fail to expand the recruitment pool for social care. Labor short-

ages are likely to persist as long as workers are required to adapt to a regime of

fragmented time and to work more hours than are paid, even at pay rates close

to the national minimum wage. ©2015Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Keywords: reward systems, recruitment, quality of work life

754 HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT, SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2015

Human Resource Management DOI: 10.1002/hrm

Although the

significant variations

in the organization of

social care found in

comparative research

may influence the

form and significance

of working time

issues, the key

problem of how to

deliver timely social

care is common to all

systems.

to the increasing elderly population living in their

own homes.

To explore these working-time issues, we

define a fragmented time employment arrange-

ment as when employers use strict work sched-

uling to focus paid work hours at high demand

(sometimes limited to actual face-to-face engage-

ments in in-person services) and do not reward or

recognize work-related time between periods of

high or direct customer demand. This shifts the

risks of changing customer demand onto staff,

increases work intensity in each paid working

hour and blurs the boundaries between employee

and self-employed status (Supiot, 2001). However,

unlike the self-employed, care workers do not nor-

mally find their own clients or negotiate their own

fees. Although much fragmented-time work is

part-time (Blyton, 2011; Blyton & Jenkins, 2012),

not all part-time work is organized this way.

Two interlinked sets of research questions are

explored. First, to what extent does fragmented

time characterize the IDPs’ employment prac-

tices and how does this affect care workers’ pay

and working-time arrangements? Second, to what

extent are HR policies—both formal and infor-

mal—used to compensate for fragmented time to

secure an adequate labor supply? And if labor sup-

ply problems persist, why are other HR solutions

not adopted?

The first section reviews the literature on the

scope of HR strategy in sectors characterized by

small workplaces and subcontract relations and

on time management in service sectors such as

care. This is followed by a presentation of the

research methods adopted. The empirical findings

are presented in two parts: the first explores the

extent of fragmented-time systems in IDPs and the

implications for working conditions; the second

explores the use of formal or informal HR policies

to resolve recruitment and retention issues in a

context of fragmented-time policies and commis-

sioning constraints. The final discussion considers

the implications of the findings for understanding

the role and scope for HRM policies in constrained

environments.

Sectoral and Organizational Conditions and

the Strategic Space for HR Strategy

It is generally agreed (Bacon, Ackers, Storey, &

Coates, 1996; Cassell, Nadin, Gray, & Clegg,

2002; Harney & Dundon, 2006; Hayton, 2003;

Wilkinson, 1999) that HR research has focused

on large establishment firms with strong product

market power and neglected employment areas

characterized by low wages, small workplace size,

or subcontracting relations. The independent sec-

tor for adult social care in England fits each of

This article considers the role of time

in the management of domiciliary care

work for older adults in England and the

consequences for the employment con-

ditions of care staff. It makes two main

arguments: first that human resource manage-

ment (HRM) literature has paid insufficient atten-

tion to working time beyond the much debated

work-life balance issues. This neglect applies par-

ticularly to fragmented time systems of employ-

ment organization, which may even require more

commitment from staff than the full-time flexible

hours typical of high-commitment management

systems. The second argument is that the scope

for real managerial choice or strategy with respect

to human resource (HR) policies may be limited,

particularly in sectors characterized by small

establishments, low wages, and sub-

contracting relations with dominant

clients. The conditions of operat-

ing in their particular environments

may restrict the choice over man-

agement practices to alternative

ways of muddling through—or as

Hyman (1987) put it, alternative

routes to “partial failure.”

These arguments are developed

through a study of working-time

practices in independent-sector

domiciliary care providers (IDPs) in

England. These are the key employ-

ing organizations for domiciliary

social care in England; although

domiciliary care is still mainly pub-

licly commissioned and funded by

local authorities (LAs), it is primarily

undertaken by independent-sector

providers, which provide 89 percent

of domiciliary care hours (UK Home

Care Association [UKHCA], 2013).

Although the significant variations

in the organization of social care found in com-

parative research (Simonazzi, 2009) may influ-

ence the form and significance of working time

issues, the key problem of how to deliver timely

social care is common to all systems. Moreover,

pressures are likely to move arrangements in

developed economies closer to the UK model; for

example, where care is currently provided by the

family, there is pressure for more publicly funded

provision, and where care is provided by public-

sector employees, there is pressure to reduce costs

through outsourcing. The tensions revealed in the

English case around the organization of time may

thus have wider relevance for developed econo-

mies as they all grapple with providing social care